Remember Sapphire’s latest Edge VS series mini PCs? They were announced last month and with a choice of dual- and quad-core Trinity chips on board, they are pretty much the beefiest mini PCs on the market today.

KitGuru took the quad-core Edge VS8 through its paces over the weekend and came up with some pretty impressive results. At less than €400, the VS8 is a powerhouse, but it’s not perfect. Reviewers praised the compact package, low power draw and virtually inaudible operation. However, the 5400rpm hard drive didn’t impress, as it’s practically the only bottleneck in the system.

Overall though, the Edge VS8 is very nice piece of kit. It is relatively inexpensive and it wipe the floor will any Atom or Brazos nettop without breaking a sweat. In case the slow HDD is a turnoff, Sapphire will offer a barebone version, allowing users to install an SSD or hybrid drive instead.

At CES 2012 in Las Vegas, Sapphire detailed its newest Edge HD3 mini PC that will finally get some AMD love and pack AMD's latest Zacate APU, the E-450.

Sapphire has been in the nettop business for quite some time with its Edge mini PCs but for some reason was sticking only to Intel Atom D525 CPU in combination with Nvidia's ION2 GPU (on the Edge HD2) or the Intel Atom D510 in combination with the same ION 2 GPU (on the Edge HD). Luckily, now it is all over with Intel as Sapphire is preparing the Edge HD3 with AMD's E-450 APU.

In case you missed it, the E-450 ticks at 1.65GHz, has 1MB (2x512KB) of L2 cache, features Radeon HD 6320 GPU working at 508MHz (600MHz in Turbo mode) with 80 shaders units, has support for DDR3-1333 memory and a 18W TDP. Actually, this will be the only nettop (at least in Europe) with E-450 APU, of course, if Sapphire launches it soon.

There aren't that many details regarding the full Edge HD3 spec, but according to our info, it could end up with 4GB of DDR3 memory, 320GB HDD and will feature USB 3.0 connectivity.

Unfortunately, the price or the actual release date haven't been announced. Pictures of the Edge HD3 are scarse but Techpowerup managed to score a pretty good one. You can find the original picture here.

Lenovo has designed their new IdeaCentre Q180 Nettop PC so that it is not only tiny, and compact in design, but features an option of adding an optical drive without adding clutter to the desktop.

Featuring up to a Intel Atom D2800 dual-core processor and 4GB DDR3 memory the IdeaCentre Q180 supports full HD and Blu-ray 3D playback. The system also has a configurable option of AMD Radeon HD 6540A 512MB graphics with DirectX 11 support. Hard drive capacities of up to 750GB or 128GB SSD storage can be ordered.

All of the models support USB 2.0, USB 3.0, 7.1 surround sound, and 8-in-1 card reader supporting SDXC format, VGA and HDMI outputs. The systems are ENERGY STAR 5.0-certified, and support VESA mounting for optimal placement, including on back of monitor. The IdeaCentre Q180 ships with Windows 7 Home Premium or Professional.

Lenovo has designed a unique add-on DVD reader/writer or Blu-ray Disc drive for a clutter-free desktop.

MSI has added, or rather updated its line of Wind Box nettops with a new DC100 based on AMD's Brazos platform.

The 191.8x150.93x34.94mm larger and 830g heavy DC100 features AMD's latest E-450 APU featuring two Bobcat cores that work at 1.65GHz and Radeon HD 6320 graphics part. The full list of specs include 2GB of memory that can be upgraded to 4GB, a 320GB HDD, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11bgn WiFi, 5.1-channel audio with optical SPDIF, D-Sub and HDMI outputs and a total of six USB 2.0 ports.

According to MSI's product page, the new DC100 has an average power consumptiom of 40W and runs very quietly, at below 22dB.

The new Wind Box DC100 will be shipped with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS. The price or the actual release date haven't been announced.

Let’s take a look at Nvidia and what the company did over the past year. For Nvidia the future is Tegra and it was also betting a lot on the ION market, and let’s not forget that the company still makes most of its money from graphics for games.

Tegra is still not extremely popular and the most important design win is still Zune HD and recently launched and killed off Microsoft Kin. Nvidia keeps telling everyone to wait for the second half of 2010 and let’s hope for their sake that there will be some major design wins. We see a lot of potential in tablet business for this product, but not much demand has materialized yet.

ION is the one to worry about as the new Atom offers a much cheaper Broadcom decoder chip that can get you nice HD 1080 playback on a netbook or nettop. Nvidia has a point when it says that its ION graphics core can increase the encoding speed and benefit CUDA applications, but most netbook users don’t really care that much about the extras, they only want fluent 1080p playback. Let's not forget that the original IION 2 chipset with northbridge got canceled last year due Nvidia's legal fight with Intel. The current ION that you can find in Atom N4x0 powered netbook is simply a graphics core that does the graphics work for the machine.

The Geforce business is slowly recovering as the company has launched the first chip that has makes sense and can sell good, the GF104. This sub $199 product is the first product that can sell in nice volumes and help Nvidia to get its market back. ATI has sold 16 million DirectX 11 cards so far and Nvidia has a lot of catching up to do.

There are still two more cards missing, the mainstream GF106 and the entry level GF108 that should sell for some $59.99 and they should ship in millions. Both cards are DirectX 11 and they should do well for Nvidia but they only come in late summer.

Nvidia is doing a great job in mobile computing as its Optimus has won the hearts of almost every laptop manufacturer. Nvidia stole some market share from ATI, even it only has one big mobile GTX 480 that DX11 based, and it's aimed at a niche market. Ironically Nvidia won most of Calpella business with obsolete DX10 rebrands, but this is mostly thanks to power saving Optimus. The sad part for ATI is that they were the first to introduce switchable graphics, but Nvidia’s Optimus simply does it much better.

In early 2011 both AMD and Intel should have CPUs with integrated graphics, let's call them Fusion and the more of these chips gets sold, the less market will remain for entry level discrete graphics. We see trouble for discrete entry level, especially if graphics in Ontario and Llano turn out to be as good as we have reported. The really worrying part is that Nvidia is getting most of its design wins in the low-end, while ATI's mobile 5000 series dominate the premium market and obviously they have higher ASPs and sell at higher margins.Again at the same time Nvidia makes insane money with Quadro, and Fermi quadro is about to launch and take even more market share.

In DirectX 11 market ATI has a predominant market share but Nvidia still ship much more GPUs than ATI, hence makes more money.

Even with 10 months advantage on market beeing the only DirectX 11 in town, they didnt manage to steal much market from Nvidia and that in Q2 2010 Nvidia can end up with as much as 65 percent of the discrete market. Maybe we can blame TSMC for lack of 40nm chips.

With all this in mind, you can only imagine that Nvidia might need an x86 core for the future.